January 14, 2007

If the expected birth of a child is after 2007, all women, regardless of length of service, will qualify for full maternity leave. This includes 39 weeks of statuory maternity pay. They will also be allowed to work for up to 10 “keeping in touch” days during maternity leave. This also applies to adoption leave.

October 30, 2006

The recently aired Channel four documentary Dispatches may have had consumers wincing, but you can bet it also had a fair few executive managers reaching for their cell. The programme showed the apparant ease with which personal details, inlcuding Bank Account Details, Credit Card Details etc, could be procured from employees at Indian call centres. With more and more companies having Indian outsourcing operations, the risks of consumer personal data seem clear, but imagine the risk to the reputation of the large corporations if it comes to light that effectively part of their own organisation, albeit virtual, have been selling off their own consumer data.

The outsourcing industry in India is currently worth about $23 billion, and is *the major* factor in India’s economic rise. Indian IT service companies point out that this type of theft is limited to one type of outsourcing – call centres. Ian Marriot, ann analyst at Gartner says “India is in danger of becoming a victim of its own success. The increase in outsourcing is stretching India’s ability to meet the demand for experienced staff and soon European companies may need to consider alternative locations.”

October 3, 2006

With the acquirement of Del.icio.us by Yahoo we here at Jana became more uncomfortable of having our interests in the hands of a commerical body that at some point would no doubt try to exploit it. To that end, with the aid of some open source software, we have released our own, which you can find at http://www.Jana.uk.com/bookmarks. I’m sure you’ll agree that is has all the features of Del.iciou.us, and now even supports the Del.icio.us API. We’ll publish an article soon on how you can take advantage of this. Feel free to use this whether you are clients or not. It becomes more useful by aggregation as we all know.

September 15, 2006

The “first European search engine” is taking on Google with its propreitary AI technology. Accoona.eu has been designed to automatically understand what language is being used for a query. Accoona also outlines how the technology understands the meaning of a search query rather than just looking at individual keywords or boolean strings.

Google sneaked out a nice little tool recently called Related Links. Web designers can place Related Links units on their site to provide visitors with links to useful information that’s relevenat to their site’s content, including news, searches and pages.

Web 2.0 is often spoken of as a future goal, but the truth is that the change from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 is in many ways indefinable. The change is a gradual growth and we are currently witnessing the segway from one to the other, with new business models and companies showing what can be done, with the most fruitful area being Software as a Service (SAAS).

This being said, it is possible to highlight 10 key differences between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0:

1. Open standards Base: Ensure service connectivity is reliable

2. Ubiquitious Broadband: The infrastructure is now available to support web 2.0 models.

3. Less investment required: Companies can get far without a massive investment meaning companies can quickly be incubated to spread the risk.